To stay motivated to achieve anything you have to know what you want, and why …
If you don’t have a clear plan and know your “why”, you’ll lose focus on your goals, or never get started to begin with.
Your “why” is the reason behind why you’re doing what you’re doing.
A person who says “I’m going to start a business to make more money” isn’t likely to get there. Yet, the person who says “I’m going to start a business to make more money in order to get a bigger home with more room for my family” is likely to do just that. The differentiator here is that the person in the second example is doing the thing for a deeper reason.
Practical Steps for staying motivated to reach your goal
1. Keep your goal plan in plain sight. What we think about gets done. Life gets busy. Any number of things popup and vie for our attention. So, if you want your own plans to have a chance, you’ve got to schedule time to work on them.
Placing important tasks on your calendar is an easy way to ensure what needs doing gets done.
2. Understand that your focus can become altered as you move through life. You must take time to reconnect with your “why.”
When I started GetMotivation I had a very clear and simple mission statement. It was “to motivate and inspire others around the world by sharing personal development resources.”
It was easy to stay on mission and do the things required to achieve the plan. Overtime, and millions of visitors later, the original mission continues to be achieved
That said, along the way an interesting thing happened.
To start, one of the primary focuses was to share other personal development expert’s work and content with our audience. As things evolved I began to write and share my own thoughts too, but the focus was mostly on sharing other’s work, and occasionally my own content.
This worked great for many years.
Overtime the focus began to shift towards sharing primarily my own content. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. Just that in my case it didn’t really fit with the mission that’s personally important to me. Ironically, the more “me focused” approach worked… at least by other’s measurement. I got a book deal, among other things. All that said, I realize now upon reflection that I lost the deep interest and focus I had when I was more aligned with my original mission.
My solution you ask?
I stepped away from what I was doing online for the most part. Of course my sites kept running. The products I offer are still out there and available. I just focused in other areas for a bit.
Fortunately it wasn’t long and I decided to get back to my “roots” and refocus the mission statement. Now the work I do related to the professional development industry looks like this: I run GetMotivation, the newsletter, and other related sites I operate. My existing products are available and I’m open to creating new ones where doing so make sense. I’ve reconnected with the sharing of articles and great content from leading personal growth experts. These are in line with my “why” — the reason I do all that’s involved in making things a success.
Live BIG,
Josh Hinds
* Author of “Why Perfect Timing is a Myth”, and “It’s Your Life, Live Big.”